Ready to Run: Werewolves in Love, Book 3
Page 4
If she weren’t such a coward, she would’ve left Luxor years ago. Wayne couldn’t have found her in Houston or Austin or some other large city, but the idea of picking up and moving someplace she’d never been before terrified her. Marshall was familiar, and it was close enough to keep in touch with Wendy, and Grandma had finally agreed to turn her loose after years of refusing to let her go.
“Don’t you try to leave town without telling me, Sara Mae. I’d have to send Wayne after you.”
“Grandma, please, I would never talk about the business. You have to believe me.”
“I’m not just talking about the business, girl. I’m talking about sin. Luxor is a righteous town, but the world out there is wicked. Look at what happened to your mama. It’s her fault you’ve got the Devil in you.”
Righteousness wasn’t a virtue Sara associated with her hometown. Bigotry, hypocrisy and violence, yes. Righteousness, no.
Sara’s mother had moved away from Luxor when she was a teenager, only to end up getting pregnant and running back home. Which was why Sara had put herself on the Pill at seventeen—Grandma would have liked to die if she knew her granddaughter hadn’t been a virgin in a while.
Sara wasn’t sure how much the old woman actually cared about her. Helen Hedges was not the maternal type. But Wayne had convinced his mother they couldn’t trust her. Wayne liked having an unpaid messenger at his beck and call. Plus, he was an evil son of a bitch and enjoyed making her life hell. He hadn’t been happy when, for reasons known only to her and God, Grandma had changed her mind one day and told Sara she could go to Marshall with her blessings.
Would Nash be back in Houston by then, or would he have moved on?
When she thought about him, she felt a tightness in her throat and around her heart. She’d never expected to fall like this. Maybe her feelings for Nash were partly a reaction to the escape he might have represented. He’d told her a little about his life in Houston, his time in the Marines and all the places he’d been around the world.
A few times she’d caught herself imagining a life with him—a house in Katy or Pearland or some other suburb of Houston she’d spent hours furtively researching on the Internet, holed up in her apartment on her laptop like she was watching porn or something.
As she turned onto the gravel road that wound its way to Grandma’s front door, she smiled to think of how her high school teachers would react if they knew her plans.
“Sara! Houston is full of fae and shapeshifters!”
“Damn straight!” she’d reply.
In her dreams.
The hundred-year-old house sat in a clearing on the edge of Lake Caddo. Uncle Jasper’s trailer hugged the lakeshore about a mile and a half to the south, shielded from sight by pine trees and canopied by the dripping cypresses that loomed out of the swampy lake.
The nearest house was more than five miles away, and the din of traffic on Highway 43 couldn’t penetrate the dense trees. Still, the woods and the swamp were noisy at nightfall, crickets, frogs and owls all competing to be heard. Something slid into the lake with a soft splash. She thought of Nash again, who was probably still on an airboat out there.
She smelled no acrid, Drano-like scent on the breeze, which meant Jasper wasn’t cooking. When she slammed the car door shut, a startled deer sprang past her and disappeared into the woods. She peeked around the side of the house, where Grandma and Jasper parked their cars. Both were there.
She knocked, heard no answer, and let herself in. Grandma never locked the front door. Few people ever made it out here. Of those who did, none would dare steal anything from Helen Hedges.
“Grandma?” She set the Tupperware container on the coffee table.
“Grandma?” she called again, a little louder.
Relieved when she didn’t hear anything, she almost laughed out loud. Grandma was out in the woods somewhere, and there was no sign of Jasper. Her mission accomplished, she was free to go. Even if Nash had something bad to tell her tonight, it had to be better than hanging around here.
She paused with her hand on the doorknob.
What if Grandma had something she needed Sara to do? What if she were really sick and needed medicine? She was a mean old bitch, but Sara wouldn’t leave an eighty-three-year-old woman to suffer.
Besides, what if the mean old bitch got pissed at her for running off without saying hi and decided she couldn’t move to Marshall after all?
With a heavy sigh, she tiptoed back to the master bedroom.
“Grandma?”
The sight that greeted her when she turned on the light was so bizarre she just stood there blinking.
Grandma, clad in the thick flannel nightgown she wore year-round, lay on her back on the same side of the bed she always slept on, eyes closed as if in sleep. But somehow Sara would’ve known she wasn’t sleeping, even if there hadn’t been a large, handsome man in an expensive-looking suit sitting in the middle of the bed next to her. He reclined against the headboard with his hands behind his head, legs stretched out. His smile was violent.
Her hand went numb. Her purse landed on the carpet with a muffled thud.
“Hello, lovely. You must be Sara.” He spoke with an accent she didn’t recognize—not that she’d met many foreigners.
“You look as delicious as your Uncle Wayne said you were.”
At the mention of Wayne, a small, strangled sound escaped her. Her legs suddenly felt at once both weak as water and far too heavy to move. She clutched the doorframe and tried to swallow, paralyzed by fear. It was like a nightmare, where something horrible was chasing her and she couldn’t scream and she couldn’t run…
“I wondered if you would come back here or if I would have to go after you. But you are dutiful granddaughter, no?”
Run.
The handsome man in the expensive suit patted the bed. “Why don’t you sit down so we can get acquainted? You can tell me all about your wonderful memory until my friend gets here to pick us up.”
He pulled a phone from his pocket, dialed, said a few words in a foreign language, and slipped it back into the pin-striped coat pocket.
Move, you idiot! Run! Now!
Her memory? Why would he want to know about her memory?
The question jolted her from her paralysis. She shook her head and blinked again. The guy was still smiling at her, savoring her terror.
Sara let go of the doorframe. She swallowed, picked up her purse and ran like hell.
When she got to the front door, she found him leaning against it, as relaxed as he’d been in Grandma’s bed, still smiling at her with those huge, white teeth.
She knew he’d been sitting on the bed when she turned and ran. She knew she hadn’t seen or felt him pass her in the hall.
She knew exactly what he was.
“Have a seat, my dear,” said the werewolf.
Bryan wasn’t used to indecision. This was a bad time for it.
If Sara wasn’t taking food to her grandmother but was actually making a delivery, he needed to follow her. Maybe he’d finally see one of the wolves they suspected were moving in on Hedges territory. He could call his contact in the Dallas FBI field office and then stick around to keep an eye on things until the Feds showed up. The Feds would finally get their hands on one of Dominic Kuba’s guys, and Bryan could finally get the hell out of Luxor.
Sara would probably wind up getting arrested herself, or at least hauled in for questioning. The prospect bothered him.
He should never have gotten so involved with her.
Dumbass.
At first, he’d had a reason for hanging out at the restaurant and managing to bump into her around town—he was investigating the Hedges operation, and she was a Hedges. But after nearly two months of living in this backwards-ass town, tailing and bugging Wayne Hedges and getting to know Sara, he’d become convinced she wasn’t involved in her family’s operation. She worked her ass off at that crappy diner and drove a beat-up old convertible, all she cared about was goi
ng to college, and she seemed to hate her family.
Unless it had all been an act? Wayne Hedges was a moron—it hadn’t taken two months to figure that out. Bryan had never actually seen Jasper. The old lady was the brains behind the operation, despite her Bible-thumping, banana-bread-baking profile. Maybe Sara was just as good at maintaining a front as her grandmother was.
It didn’t feel that way, though. She was utterly different from the other three, a wildflower among the weeds. Did anyone in Luxor understand how different she was?
He’d been ready to talk to her tonight, explain his job here, what he was doing and what he needed. He’d thought she’d be open to helping him. Maybe he’d been about to make a really stupid mistake.
Bryan had told himself that if he didn’t sleep with her, it wouldn’t get serious and he could slip out of town with a clear conscience when the time came.
Dumbass.
Maybe she really was taking food to the old lady. Why would she work so many shifts at the diner if she was one of Wayne’s couriers? Unless the sweaty scumbag didn’t pay her, which wouldn’t be surprising. He was rolling in dough, but Wayne Hedges favored cheap cars, cheap booze, cheap hookers and fifty cent slot machines in Shreveport. Maybe the old lady kept all the money.
The Feds had known about the Hedges for a long time, but they hadn’t been able to spare the resources to go after what was still basically a rural network, not with the heavy urban trafficking they had to combat. All that changed when they realized the European wolves were moving in on rural operations, including the Hedges’s. Nick Wargman offered Bryan’s services. A P.I. with a background in military recon and keen outdoors skills, Bryan made a better candidate for undercover work in a little country town than a Fed would, and he wouldn’t be monitored by a bureaucracy. The FBI accepted the help, which showed how desperate they were for a break in this case.
Thinking about his Alpha had a profound effect on his resolve. Bad enough that he’d let his dick get involved in this. If he sat here mooning over Sara Hedges and missed his chance to catch one of those guys, Nick would skin him alive and make a rug from his fur.
He started the bike and headed for Highway 43.
“I said sit down, Sara.”
She had an insane urge to giggle. The heavy accent made him sound like a character in a cartoon. “Seedown, Sara.”
Those teeth. He wouldn’t stop smiling, so she couldn’t stop staring. If she hadn’t known he was a werewolf, she probably wouldn’t have thought there was anything unusual about his teeth. But she did know, so they looked enormous.
He stepped toward her. She stumbled back. Her legs remembered how to work just before they buckled. She staggered to the couch and huddled at one end.
He sat down in the middle, turning to her and putting his arm across the back of the sofa. His fingertips brushed her shoulder as he took a strand of her hair and rubbed it between his fingers, much like Nash had done at the Café last night.
When this guy did it, it felt like a roach crawling across her scalp. He smelled good, which made it even more horrible.
“You have beautiful hair, Sara. I am partial to redheads. And your skin—it’s like milk, like marble milk.” His knuckles brushed her cheek and she whimpered. A tiny portion of her mind kept telling her to get a grip, pull herself together, but she couldn’t hear it very well over the screaming terror in the rest of her brain.
She gasped as he ran his hand roughly into her hair, exposing her ear, which he traced with his thumb. “Hasn’t anyone ever noticed your ears, Sara? No one has ever mentioned the shape? Or do you keep them covered with glorious red hair?”
Her whole body trembled uncontrollably. She felt herself shutting down, and she was ashamed, but she didn’t think she could fight it, didn’t think she could halt the slide into paralyzing panic.
Even though 43 was usually deserted this far outside Luxor, it wasn’t necessarily strange when a car rolled past him doing a sedate fifty miles per hour or so. What caught Bryan’s attention was the make and model. No one in Luxor would drive a black Mercedes CL550. But he knew who would.
What was it with Kuba’s guys and their cars? Didn’t the sleazy fuckers realize every cop and federal agent between here and Florida was twitchy for werewolves driving high-end Mercedes? Surely, after what had gone down in Houston, and then Atlanta and New Orleans, they knew they were on everyone’s radar.
Of course, they didn’t get caught in Houston, Atlanta or New Orleans. Or Miami, where they’d first set up shop before oozing west and north.
They kept slipping through every dragnet and dodging every ambush, leaving the FBI, DEA and various police agencies holding their dicks in their hands. So why should they bother to keep a low profile, especially on an isolated stretch of rural East Texas road?
Waiting until he was certain the Mercedes was going to turn onto the gravel road that led nowhere but the Hedges house, he veered off into the trees. The path he followed was too narrow for his tires, but it provided a shortcut to the house. He’d discovered it the first time he’d come out here to take a look at the largest meth manufacturing and distribution operation in the tri-state area.
Halfway to the house, he killed the engine and called Dallas. They’d have four agents out here within the hour—they weren’t taking any chances this time.
After he hung up, he opened one of his saddlebags, removing a pair of silver handcuffs and a Colt Mustang.
Honorable werewolves didn’t use weapons unless they were in an army. In personal combat, or even large group combat, weapons were shameful, as were surprise attacks. But honor wasn’t owed to dope-dealing, weapons-smuggling sex slavers, was it? And if he went after them in wolf form, he’d probably kill them, or at least render them difficult to interrogate.
The only cop who’d gotten close enough to touch these assholes since they’d left Miami was Taran Lloyd. He’d killed two of them. No one blamed him for doing it, since they were on their way to kill Taran’s mate, but still—you couldn’t interrogate dead wolves. The Feds needed suspects, not corpses, and bullets were so much more precise than fangs and claws.
The Colt in one gloved hand, silver cuffs in the other, he ran for the old lady’s house.
Sara squeezed her eyes shut and forced a couple deep breaths into and out of her lungs. She imagined what Wendy would say about this. “I told her to stay away from werewolves, but she wouldn’t listen. She just kept talking about how it’s the twenty-first century and werewolves are people too…”
Wayne. Wayne did this to me.
The outrage worked as a brake on the hysteria. She was still scared to death, but she wasn’t going to shut down and give up. She was going to pray very, very hard. If nothing else, she’d figure out a way to kill herself before they had a chance to do whatever they were going to do to her. And if by some miracle she managed to get away, or someone rescued her—yeah, sure—she was going to kill her Uncle Wayne.
The wolf was still playing with her hair. “My friends will like you very much. Your uncle says you’d like to travel, yes? Well, tonight you will ride on an airplane. We—”
The werewolf froze, lifting his head as if listening to something. “Ah. Our ride is here. We leave now. See? You get out of Luxor, just like you want.”
Then she heard the crunch of tires on gravel.
He reached the house before the Mercedes. He’d wondered briefly, as he was running through the woods, if maybe he should wait and confirm that the driver was a werewolf and not a wealthy human meth addict. But as he emerged from the trees into the small clearing, he realized that wouldn’t be necessary. He smelled another wolf as he heard a heavily accented voice coming from inside the ramshackle old house.
“My friends will like you very much. Your uncle says you’d like to travel, yes? Well, tonight you will ride on an airplane. We— Ah. Our ride is here. We leave now. See? You get out of Luxor, just like you want.”
Bryan knew what these guys did to women like Sara.
She wasn’t his mate. He’d been out with her three times. He hadn’t even slept with her. Yet the idea of someone hurting her filled him with a fury he’d never felt before, not even in combat.
And he’d thought he’d just slip out of town without a word when all this was over?
Dumbass.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she heard herself saying, and she marveled at the steadiness of her voice.
That seemed to delight the werewolf. He grinned even wider as he dropped his hand to dangle on her shoulder, sickeningly close to her breast. “You think no?”
She gritted her teeth as her mind screamed at her body to just. fucking. move. “Yes. I think no.”
She’d never figure out how she did it, how she managed to shake off the terror, the deadweight inertia experienced in nightmares where you saw the train or the car, or the avalanche or the werewolf, coming straight at you and yet your body was locked in place, refusing to budge even as your every nerve burned for motion.
But somehow, she did it.
First she grasped his wrist and flung his hand away. He was still smiling at her, unsurprised at her strength—and why wouldn’t he be? It seemed Wayne had told him all about her. The werewolf’s smile stretched into a leer as he sensed her impending movement.
But hell, it wasn’t like she had anything to lose. So she leapt from the couch and launched herself across the room.